Mitt Romney and "Bronco Bamma" make a little girl cry, and a few other election-related videos

LJWorld.com weblogs Election 2012

Posted by Alex Parker November 5, 2012 at 2:40 p.m.

Mitt Romney and "Bronco Bamma" make a little girl cry, and a few other election-related videos

You think you're tired of the campaign? Did it bring you to tears, and have your distress broadcast worldwide like this four-year-old Colorado girl named Abigael? Young Abigael is fed up with electioneering, and doesn't want to hear anything more about Mitt Romney - or his opponent, "Bronco Bamma."

NPR has the story.

Tired of Bronco Bamma and Mitt Romney by Elizabeth Evans

PBS Newshour has unearthed a five-minute-long campaign ad from Gerald Ford's 1976 campaign. It was scrapped, for fear it would be too shocking to voters.

In the ad, Ford - after a long prelude - gives a speech with language that's pretty poignant: "Trust is not cleverly shading words so that each separate audience can hear what it wants to here, but saying plainly and simply what you mean and meaning what you say.

"Trust is not having to guess what a candidate means -"

A cherry bomb explodes nearby, and Ford, who survived two earlier assassination attempts, flinches.

He goes on: "It's not enough to say 'trust me.' Trust must be earned. Check out the video and read PBS' analysis of how it could have swung the election back to Ford.

In the following scenes, we see Ford parading through Dallas in a motorcade similar to John Kennedy's fatal caravan of 1963. "Neither the cherry bombs of a misguided prankster nor all the memories of recent years can keep people and their President apart," says the narrator. "When a limousine can parade openly through the streets of Dallas, there's a change that's come over America." Ford's team hoped the commercial would show that their man had closed down the bad years that led from JFK's assassination to Vietnam and Watergate. But when pollster Bob Teeter showed the commercial to a secret focus group, he discovered that "it was shocking to them..."

Never Aired Ford 1976 Campaign Ad, Courtesy of Ford Presidential Library by PBSNewsHour

Want to get to know the real candidates? Frontline created a compelling documentary looking at the lives of Obama and Romney, from childhood to today.

FRONTLINE | "The Choice 2012" (full episode, English) | PBS by PBS

And if you have some more time, Frontline also did a really interesting piece on the Super PACs that have had a huge financial impact on this election.

FRONTLINE | Preview "Big Sky, Big Money" | PBS by PBS

Delicious
Digg
Tumblr
Wordpress
Reddit
Copy and paste the link:

Agnostick 6 months, 2 weeks ago

Thank you, Alex, for sharing this. I'd never known about the unaired Ford ad.

But... I'm not so sure about the ad's potential impact on the final vote count that year. I was pretty young at the time, but I do remember one word that circulated for quite a while: Watergate. I guess I'm not really sure that any could have erased the fact that Gerald Ford was on the same team as the only man who has ever resigned the presidency. I think that was still a pretty big cloud over the president's head, at that time.